As of this writing, out of around 800 ratings, I can still count the number of my 10-star fiction television shows on my fingers. This one deserves it, to me, because it gets so, so much right.
It's not everyone's cup of tea, I'm sure, and that's fair enough. There's a glitch between the third and fourth season where a major character is killed off...strangely. It's handled well, but you get the feeling they couldn't sign the actor back on for the new season and had to find a way to work it out. They managed it skillfully, but it stands out as the one point when you get the feeling the writers weren't in complete control. If you simply don't like the genre, well, that can't be helped and again that's perfectly fair. Despite maintaining a good balance of action with drama, the pacing feels glacial at times, and while I personally found the story to be so well told that it turned into more of a feature than a bug, it's easy to see how some could find it hard to digest. So, take this review with the understanding that, like all reviews, I write it through a very subjective lens.
First off, this is one of the few instances, in my opinion, that a novel-to-film adaptation not only faithfully translates the source material, but also significantly improves upon it. I read the novel when I was a teenager, and in my mind filed it away with all those other 60's era dystopian stories, with their bleak, hopeless, cynical messages of warning and nihilistic endings. This series exhausts the novel by the end of season one, however, and I was delighted to find that the writers managed to continue the story in fine fashion, fleshing out and deepening the characters, adding dimensions (hahahah...oh, me...), and maintaining and raising the quality of the storytelling throughout.
There are major twists and turns in the plot, more than enough to keep me yearning to know what would happen next. Main characters aren't safe at all, but you never get that nihilistic feeling that they're all doomed, either, so it's okay to let yourself care about them. The story is driven by promise after promise of a major payoff to come, much like other heavy-hitting, high profile series such as Game of Thrones and LOST. The notable difference that sets MitHC above those titles, however, is the expertly planned ending. I can't emphasize the importance of this enough. While those other shows' creators, in the end, were not up to the challenge of adequately delivering on the promises they made, this show does. The ending resolves all the remaining characters' stories with a level of satisfaction that left me and my wife shouting at the screen, pining for all the shows we wished had ended this well that failed to do so. It left us both looking forward to a complete re-watch to catch everything we missed. For that reason, this deserves its 10 stars, because it's a shining example of an ambitious television series that boldly promises an epic beginning, middle, and end, and then proceeds to actually deliver the complete package with complete authority.
This is one of those rare shows, like GoT and LOST, that reach higher than they have any right to. It's like they manage to blow open the lid on their respective Pandora's boxes. When all was said and done, however, and all that destructive, dramatic, mysterious, explosive magic had been released, MitHC's showrunners demonstrated the rare gift of knowing how to close the lid back again.
It's not everyone's cup of tea, I'm sure, and that's fair enough. There's a glitch between the third and fourth season where a major character is killed off...strangely. It's handled well, but you get the feeling they couldn't sign the actor back on for the new season and had to find a way to work it out. They managed it skillfully, but it stands out as the one point when you get the feeling the writers weren't in complete control. If you simply don't like the genre, well, that can't be helped and again that's perfectly fair. Despite maintaining a good balance of action with drama, the pacing feels glacial at times, and while I personally found the story to be so well told that it turned into more of a feature than a bug, it's easy to see how some could find it hard to digest. So, take this review with the understanding that, like all reviews, I write it through a very subjective lens.
First off, this is one of the few instances, in my opinion, that a novel-to-film adaptation not only faithfully translates the source material, but also significantly improves upon it. I read the novel when I was a teenager, and in my mind filed it away with all those other 60's era dystopian stories, with their bleak, hopeless, cynical messages of warning and nihilistic endings. This series exhausts the novel by the end of season one, however, and I was delighted to find that the writers managed to continue the story in fine fashion, fleshing out and deepening the characters, adding dimensions (hahahah...oh, me...), and maintaining and raising the quality of the storytelling throughout.
There are major twists and turns in the plot, more than enough to keep me yearning to know what would happen next. Main characters aren't safe at all, but you never get that nihilistic feeling that they're all doomed, either, so it's okay to let yourself care about them. The story is driven by promise after promise of a major payoff to come, much like other heavy-hitting, high profile series such as Game of Thrones and LOST. The notable difference that sets MitHC above those titles, however, is the expertly planned ending. I can't emphasize the importance of this enough. While those other shows' creators, in the end, were not up to the challenge of adequately delivering on the promises they made, this show does. The ending resolves all the remaining characters' stories with a level of satisfaction that left me and my wife shouting at the screen, pining for all the shows we wished had ended this well that failed to do so. It left us both looking forward to a complete re-watch to catch everything we missed. For that reason, this deserves its 10 stars, because it's a shining example of an ambitious television series that boldly promises an epic beginning, middle, and end, and then proceeds to actually deliver the complete package with complete authority.
This is one of those rare shows, like GoT and LOST, that reach higher than they have any right to. It's like they manage to blow open the lid on their respective Pandora's boxes. When all was said and done, however, and all that destructive, dramatic, mysterious, explosive magic had been released, MitHC's showrunners demonstrated the rare gift of knowing how to close the lid back again.